festival

We’re psyched to be a part of OKFestival: Open Knowledge in Action. The OKFestival takes place September 17-22, 2012 in Helsinki, Finland, and features “a series of hands-on workshops, talks, hackathons, meetings and sprints” exploring a variety of areas including open development, open cultural heritage, and gender and diversity in openness. You can buy tickets to the festival for any number of days until September 16 at http://okfestival.org/early-bird-okfest-tickets/. The OKFestival website has all the details, including the preliminary schedule.

We are particularly interested in and helped to shape the Open Research and Education topic stream, where we are leading an “Open Peer Learning” workshop on Wednesday (Sept 19) from 11:30am to 3:30pm. For the workshop the School of Open (co-led by Creative Commons and P2PU) is combining forces with the OKFN’s School of Data to explore, test and develop learning challenges around open tools and practices in data, research, and education. Participation in the workshop is free (you don’t even have to buy a festival ticket), but space is limited, so RSVP at: http://peerlearningworkshop.eventbrite.com/

The workshop will be held in this awesome space, reserved for four HACK workshops:

For the rest of you, you can still participate in helping to build initiatives like the School of Open from wherever you are by visiting http://schoolofopen.org/ and signing up for the mailing lists there.

Mozilla has announced the first ever Drumbeat Festival focused on learning, freedom, and the web. Mozilla wants you to save the dates November 4-5, as the festival is set to take place in Barcelona—also where the Open Ed Conference will be taking place from November 2-4. From the announcement:

Learning, freedom and the web are connected. This connection has huge potential. The technology and culture of the internet offer the raw material to put people in control of their own learning in a massive and transformative way. At the same time, teachers and learners can play a critical role in ensuring that these raw materials — and the internet as a whole — remain open and free.

This is the focus of Mozilla’s first annual Drumbeat Festival: gathering passionate and practical people who are experimenting, inventing, creating, exploring and building things at the intersection of learning, freedom and the web.

1. A secure ‘data backpack’ where students control their own learning materials and credentials
2. Libraries transformed into digital garages where kids learn to make, do and create with an agile, hacker attitude
3. Massively scaled apprenticeship, we people learn by diving into the world of open source master craftspeople
4. Hackerspaces where people teach each other about everything from robots to lasers to knitting
5. Alternative accreditation models based on web and open source peer review techniques

The idea is to gather people working on ideas like this — and people with all the puzzle pieces needed to make them real at a massive scale.

Creative Commons, along with the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is partnering with Mozilla to make this event possible. For more information and to sign up to receive updates visit http://drumbeat.org/drumbeat_festival_2010.